Psychos

Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane

Edited and with Commentary by John Skipp

This collection of 35 terrifying tales of serial killers at large, written by the great masters of the genre, plumbs the horrifying depths of a deranged mind and the evil that compels a human being to murder, gruesomely and methodically, over and over again.

From Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs) to Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), stories of serial killers and psychos loom large and menacing in our collective psyche. Tales of their grisly conquests have kept us cowering under the covers but still turning the pages.

Psychos is the first book to collect in a single volume the scariest and most well-crafted fictional works about these deranged killers. Some of the stories are classics, the best that the genre has to offer, by renowned writers such as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Grisham, and Thomas Harris. Other selections are from the latest and most promising crop of new authors.

John Skipp, who is also the editor of Zombies, Demons, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters, provides fascinating insight, through two nonfiction essays, into our insatiable obsession with serial killers and how these madmen are portrayed in popular culture.Resources at the end of the book include lists of the genre’s best long-form fiction, movies, websites, and writers.

John Skipp is a New York Times best-selling author and editor whose 18 books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, Book of the Dead, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature, enlarging the scope of George Romero’s vision of the dead next door and bringing it to new levels of intensity. He later edited three more zombie anthologies, including Mondo Zombie, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best anthology, and Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, published by Black Dog & Leventhal. Skipp is recognized as splatterpunk’s founding father and the elder statesman of the genre. His own legendary horror works include The Light at the End, The Scream, Jake's Wake, and The Long Last Call. He lives in Los Angeles.